Freezing pitch forces Hatters on to Creasey Park

Freezing conditions at Ely Way have forced the Hatters to find other facilities to train on ahead of Saturday’s visit of Forest Green Rovers, writes Mark Wood.

Town today (Thursday) trained on the artificial facilities at Creasey Park in Dunstable, but boss Paul Buckle admitted it wasn’t the best form of preparation.

He said: “This is decent. It’s not ideal to not be able to train on grass, but as I’ve said before we won’t make any excuses.

“I’m just so hell-bent on getting every player in our building, from the youth team to the reserves to the first team wanting to fight and die for the cause.

“And I’ve got to have that and there’s got to be a reason why we haven’t got out of this league and it’s my job at this moment in time to find that.”

It’s been a topsy-turvy last week for Luton as, having triumphed 1-0 at Premier League Norwich City in the fourth round of the FA Cup the week before, they lost 3-0 at Grimsby Town in the quarter-finals of the FA Trophy and then slumped to a 1-0 defeat at lowly Barrow.

“It’s an amazing week really,” said Buckle. “We go from beating a Premiership team away to losing to a team that’s in the bottom four.

“But that’s football, this is what you have to suffer, this is what you have to take as a player, a coach, a manager, highs and lows all the time, dust yourself down and go again and that’s what we’re doing.

“It’s gone now, it’s history and it’s a good learning curve for us. We’ve still go a lot of games left and they’re going to come thick and fast now.

“That’s what makes it such a fantastic game and sport, because you never know.

“The one thing it does teach us is you have to be on your game every week, if you’re not you can come unstuck.

“It’s nothing new to me and I’ve understood that for a number of years.

“It’s identifying where you go wrong and putting it right next week and by and large this season when we’ve come unstuck we’ve always put a decent run together afterwards.

“It’s consistency. We spoke it this morning with the players and they know it’s individual error that’s cost us this season.

“Whenever we’ve fallen behind or lost a game it’s not really been great goals. We looked at the DVD of all the goals against and you can probably count on one hand how many excellent goals were scored against us.

“So it’s a case now of in and around our own box, and sort of 30, 40 yards from goal doing the basics right.”

But Buckle is looking forward to his side returning to Kenilworth Road where they have enjoyed better fortune of late.

He said: “Our form’s been exceptional, I can’t remember the last time we came unstuck at home, it’s been a good few months.

“We’ve been a different class. There’s so many things to that we’ve done right. It’s only a couple of weeks ago that we were scoring six goals at home in the league and beating a Championship team and a Premiership team.

“We’ve lost one game of football. The key now for us is to learn by it.

“This is what I’m crying out for from the players, come on and switch on, come and get your head on the ball and clear it away because really and truthfully it’s not been much more than that that has undone us.”

And with the season entering the business end of the campaign, Buckle has called upon his players to eliminate individual errors.

He added: “They’re all big games and they’re only going to get bigger as the clock ticks down.

“I’m not sure if it’s 19 or 20 games we’ve got left, there’s so much football to be played.

This website and its associated newspaper adheres to the Independent Press Standards Organisation's Editors' Code of Practice.
If you have a complaint about editorial content which relates to inaccuracy or intrusion, then contact the
Editor by clicking here.

If you remain dissatisfied with the response provided then you can contact the IPSO by
clicking here.

Dunstable Today provides news, events and sport features from the Luton area. For the best up to date information relating to Luton and the surrounding areas visit us at Dunstable Today regularly or bookmark this page.

For you to enjoy all the features of this website Dunstable Today requires permission to use cookies.

Find Out More ▼

What is a Cookie?

What is a Flash Cookie?

Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?

About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.

This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.

Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.

The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:

Revenue Science ►

A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.

Google Ads ►

Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.

Digital Analytics ►

This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.

Dart for Publishers ►

This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.

ComScore ►

ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.

Local Targeting ►

Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.

Grapeshot ►

We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.

Subscriptions Online ►

Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.

Add This ►

Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.